Flickr to Panoramio – One More Attempt

I really want to contribute to Panoramio. Really, I do. I would love to have my photos show up in a native layer on Google Earth without having to use a third-party KML/KMZ file. So I’ve been looking for work-arounds for their security problems and inability to upload more than 10 images at a time.

I had been using the Saleen Flickr Bulk Downloader to download my images from Flickr to be uploaded to Panoramio. I noticed that it had an option to download smaller images, and not just the originals. I decided to give that a try.

I went through and tagged several of my Flickr images with the “panoramio” tag, then set the downloader to only download those tagged images in what Flickr considers “medium” sized, which is about 500 X 333, depending on actual aspect ratio. This is large enough for the image to appear in Google Earth without compromising the security of the original image.

From there, my plan was to bulk upload to Picasa Web, where it should have been an easy process to send them on over to Panoramio. I was going to use the desktop version of Picasa to clean up any problems with titles, tags, geotagging or incorrect locations.

Nice idea, but unfortunately it didn’t work.

When I tried to view the geotagged information for my test images, all of it was missing. Apparently the only way to bring that information in from Flickr is to download the original image with the EXIF data intact. Picasa has no way of doing a bulk resize (or any kind of resize, for that matter.) I guess I could automate the process through Photoshop, but that adds yet another step, and this is already getting needlessly complicated.